March 17, 2011

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two. The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That's the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’. ...

The D.O.J. and Civil Service Board declined Dayton’s News Source’s repeat requests for interviews. The lower standards mean 258 more people passed the test. The city won't say how many were minorities. ...

The D.O.J. has forced other police departments across the country to lower testing standards, citing once again that not enough black candidates were passing.

A story on WHIO in Dayton gives a few more (sometimes conflicting) numbers:

Officials with the City of Dayton Service Board announced Thursday that it has accepted the cutoff score for the police recruit written examination administered on Nov. 20, 2010. Officials said a total of 1,083 candidates completed the written portion of the examination.

The test was administered in two parts, a Test Preparation Manual (TPM) test with 86 questions and a Situational Judgment and Writing Ability Test (SJWAT) with 102 questions.After consultation with the United States Department of Justice, as well as Fire & Police Selection, Inc., the creator of the written examination, the cutoff score for the examination is 50 points for the TPM portion and 64 points for the SJWAT portion.

This resulted in 748 individuals passing the written examination, which was a pass/fail examination.

Presumably, this means that the top 748 out of 1083 now proceed afresh through the oral part of the hiring process all with equal chances.

So, under the original scoring, 490 of 1,083 candidates for these "dozens" of jobs passed the test. So, you had to be in the top 45% on the written test. Now, they'll go down another quartile.

The bad drives out the good. The better, more capable workers start looking to jump ship and go elsewhere or retire out as early as possible, leaving behind an increasingly lousy and ineffective police department. Clearance rates for murder, rape, robbery, burglary, auto theft go down and public perceptions of vulnerability go up. The cops will become more lethargic and crooked and resemble the predatory Mexican police. Funny how the tail wags the dog in this country, thirteen percent of the population, with the help of their enablers, manage to drag down almost every aspect of public and private life here.

We'd get better cops with straight quotas. Hire the best white for the white jobs and hire the best blacks for the black jobs.

This tactic of lowering the standards until blacks can pass just means more dumb whites become cops. Jobs will be handed out less on merit and more on nepotism and connections.

Now, high IQ whites can play the connections game better than dumb whites. But this means more dumb-ass nephews and cousins of cops will get on the force. It means more corruption from both the black and white cops.

I'd rather have some dumb black cops and mostly smart white cops who I could trust than both stupid black and stupid white cops.

Maybe the non-NAM candidates will sue. They won't get jobs but could possibly get some money; after all, the US Supreme Court just ruled in the New Haven Firefighters' case that this exact behavior-- ignoring test results when NAMs don't score well-- is against the law.

That'll be sure to make the city safer. I'm sure they'll perform as outstandingly in looting, and otherwise contributing to the problem instead of the solution in the event of a disaster as the dumbed-down police force in New Orleans did when Katrina hit.

"if white americans benefited from centuries of free labor, don't you think that this is just fair? "

No, Slavery ended almost 150 years ago. Slaves werern't free. They had to be fed,clothed and housed.Was there any difference between that and whites working for mines who only got paid in script and could use it only at the company store? Patrick Henry pointed out wage workers in the North to a friend and liked that system becuase it was CHEAPER he said than having slaves. You had to worry about the children on slaves and if slaves got hurt they had to be taken care of. A white wage earner, once injured, was fired and the owner got someone else. He didn't care what happened to the worker or his family. I am not saying slavery was good, but being a wage earner back then wasn't very good either. They both had pretty unpleasant situations.

If there ever was a case for reparations, it was when the slaves were still alive.

if white americans benefited from centuries of free labor, don't you think that this is just fair?

are you against reparations?

I dunno, you tell me.

A subset of all white people 150+ years ago benefited from slavery. From that, you get "all white people benefited from slavery." So there's your first dubious leap; what a white guy in Poland got out of it is anybody's guess.

(Not to mention, the reverse consideration, i.e., blacks and suffering)

Then, from there, you go to the descendants of the people in question, people who may or may not actually have benefitted from what may or may not have benefitted their great-great-grandparents (or whatever). So there's your second dubious leap.

(Not to mention, the reverse consideration, i.e., descendants of blacks and suffering)

Then you have to consider the roughly 23% of Americans who are neither black nor white, but will no doubt be eligible to be screwed over in this process of punitive tax-and-spend.

Then you have to ignore the fact that welfare has already paid out roughly 20k per capita to blacks, which is, ironically, roughly what a lot of reparations folks suggest as a per capita reparations payout. This is money mostly coming from non-blacks, so in a very real sense, reparations have already been paid.

Then you have to consider the can of worms you're opening with this "collective punishment" thing. If it's okay to punish the whites for the color of their skin owing to what some white folks did 150+ years ago, is it okay to punish blacks for the color of their skin owing to what some black folks are doing right now (outsized tax burden, super-outsized crime burden, uber-PITA politically, collective nightmare to live among, etc)?

So, you tell me, do I think "reparations" are fair?

And really, leaving aside power politics for a sec, on a logical and moral precedent level, TRUST ME, this thing is a can of worms. Sure, right now non-blacks are sissies who have trouble speaking honestly to blacks, much less playing hardball. But if that changes, the precedent this sets could be really ugly; do you really want white (or non-black) America presenting black America with a bill? You know, for all the shit black America gets and has gotten from white (non-black) America over the years?

Guess how we calculate that bill? We compare the "victims'" (black Americans, or at least, black Americans whose ancestors go back far enough) standard of living with the "non-victims'" (blacks in Africa) standard of living and charge the former for the difference (trust me, it's huge).

That's really my biggest problem with the whole "American blacks are victims" mentality. They aren't! They're the lucky ones, and the transatlantic trade was the best thing that could have happened to them. If the crime was bringing them here and putting them in chains, then the restitution should be to take off the chains and sending them back. If they opt out of part of that restitution, they should STFU and count their lucky stars.

Anonymous: if white americans benefited from centuries of free labor, don't you think that this is just fair?

are you against reparations?

Well, I think paying reparations is a very fair and reasonable solution, with the funding obviously to be drawn from the descendants of the slave-owners themselves. Now from what I've seen, American blacks are on average something like 25% white, with nearly all of that white ancestry presumably coming from the aforementioned slave-owners. On the other hand, considering that only a small fraction of whites in 1860 owned slaves, and obviously none of the post-1860 arrived whites did, I'd guess that the fractional slave-owner ancestry of today's American whites is almost negligible.

Therefore, the obvious solution is funding the payment of reparations to American blacks is by confiscating the property of the descendants of slave-owners, namely lighter-skinned American blacks. Given the longstanding and notorious tensions within the American black community between the darker-skinned and lighter-skinned segments, I suspect that having the government confiscate the property of all the lighter-skinned blacks and redistributing it to the darker-skinned ones will receive an enormously enthusiastic reaction...

My guess is, there will turn out to be little difference between them. Rather like with the wars on terrorism and drugs, bailouts for oligarchs who make bad bets, and informally tolerated massive illegal immigration, quotas are elite consensus policy. And Obama is no more inclined to go against that than Bush was.

To expand on what Svigor wrote, lets also mention that the US government didn't own any slaves or carry out slaving operations. It was carried out by private groups and operations, not the public sector. So suing the government for slavery is about as rational as suing the government for finding out you bought a scratched CD.

Secondly, nearly all black slaves in the US were sold into slavery by other Africans, who interestingly get left out of the history textbooks in schools. Culpability traces back to Africa. At least the whites who bought slaves paid for what they received. The black enslavers were the ones who stole blacks from their homelands and marched them to distributors.

Third, millions of European whites were enslaved by Africans yet you never hear a word about that either in the history textbooks in school. In fact, if we are going to argue about slavery, then one could argue that it was this enslavement, which happened earlier than the sale of blacks to America, that made it morally acceptable to some whites centuries ago to buy black slaves.

The whole reason we are having this discussion is black incompetence, the real reason for black suffering the world over. Pointing to African culpability in slavery does no good for black Americans, not only because it breaks with the conventional lies that artificially elevate their esteem, but also because of the simple reason that blacks there are incompetent too, so you can't get $$ from there.

This will end up worse than Obama's 'Chicago politics.' Where we end up in this story is Nigeria. NAM law enforcement needs booze money for the weekend so they set up a roadblock. You call the cops to report a break-in and turns out it's the cops breaking in. Barack Hussein turns on the immigration spigots, with the endgame being a white minority tax farm carrying all the net-consuming NAMs.

How could things have come to this? Why did the Republicans nominate a desperate old man who promised nothing but more wars, more financial rape, more deficits, more immigration?

I'm in favor of reparations as long as it involved a one-way plane ticket to another country, followed by mandatory permanent loss of US citizenship, followed by a death sentence in the event the person ever returns to the US. Whatever that cost would be totally worth it.

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